It's Time to Reconsider... the Gor films

Editor’s note: In this edition of “It’s Time to Reconsider…,” longtime Ranting Russell contributor Nolk Landen reassesses the two movies made from John Norman’s Gor novels, 1987’s “Gor,” and 1989’s “Outlaw of Gor” (aka “Gor II”).

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Hello Renee –

I got your email assigning me to write about Gor and Outlaw of Gor for the blog’s “It’s Time to Reconsider…” column. I had to cancel a job interview in Lamesa today so I could meet your deadline for the piece. Thanks.

I think I mentioned offhand one night recently, after I’d had five or six margaritas, that none of Urbano Barberini’s dialog in the Gor movies could possibly have been dubbed because his voice was so unbelievably grating, and now somehow I’m an expert, tasked with reappraising the movie and its sequel? Great. I saw the first movie once, upon its release in 1987 when I lived in Dubuque. The boxcar hobo behind me offered up his flask when the lights dimmed and then threw up on himself during the scene where Oliver Reed says, “it will give you the chance of experiencing the delight of giving pain.” My date that night was not impressed. She never talked to me again. The next day my car threw a rod and I was out $1,000. Not that the movie was responsible, it just brings back terrible memories, you know?

At any rate, there’s no “reconsidering” here. You can’t “reconsider” that which warranted no consideration in the first place. There’s a reason Gor has no fans. There’s a reason too that fans of the original novel by John Norman were unhappy with this low budget calamity. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s a reason Gor and its sequel haven’t been released on DVD, much less Blu-ray. No one would buy them. There is no fan base. There is no one dying to play the commentary track and listen to anyone associated with these movies discuss their memories of making it.

Adding insult to injury, this is Rebecca Ferratti post-breast implants. As you’ll recall, Rebecca Ferratti was born in Helena, MT on November 27, 1964, and is of French, Hispanic, and German descent. She was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in June, 1986, and her turn-ons are positive people, busy days, fresh air, nature, and strong-minded men like her dad. If you can get past the ghastly 80s hairdo she had back then, Rebecca was quite an attractive young woman. But then came breast implants, her role as Talena in the Gor movies, and Mötley Crüe videos, and she was forever dead to me.

So there’s nothing to “reconsider.” In fact, if you want a scene that singlehandedly sums up the Gor cinematic experience, look no further than the opening minutes of Gor, when Tarl Cabot (played by Italian hunk Urbano Barberini) is driving through the rain at night, forlorn that his ladylove isn’t joining him for a weekend in the woods. He crashes into a tree, and the explosion (why would there be a small explosion in the first place?) seems to occur a little to the right of his car, almost on the other side of the tree, away from the car itself. Pathetic.

The rest of the movie is like a waking nightmare. Talena’s father, the King, has been kidnapped by the malevolent priest-king Sarn, played here by a how-the-fuck-did-they-get-him-to-appear-in-this-piece-of-garbage? Oliver Reed. Cabot joins forces with Ferratti and her cohorts, and they set out to rescue him. Along the way, their adventures in Gor are few and agonizingly far between. That whole bit where Cabot and co. sit down for some entertainment in the bar-in-a-cave goes on for over ten goddamn minutes. The music is total shit and it’s painful watching Paul Smith slumming here as the vicious Surbus, his role as Bluto in Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) notwithstanding. So what exactly do you want me to “reconsider?” The Ranting Russell staff loves bar scenes. We discuss them frequently. Have you noticed Gor never comes up?

There’s that scene towards the end of the picture where Cabot is about to brand Talena with a hot iron and instead turns on Oliver Reed and shoves the iron into his gut, triggering the big fight scene, and Reed bellows “SEIZE HIM!” a few times and then finally thrusts both arms into the air and screams “AAAARRRHHHH!!!!!” I mean, that’s one of those things you’re watching that you can’t believe you’re watching. Barberini and Ferratti are totally surrounded by two-dozen men with big, cardboard swords but somehow no one is up to the challenge of stopping them. What is this, fucking amateur hour? Reed does nothing. He stands almost inert, screaming hysterically. It looks like if he moves too quickly his hemorrhoids will explode.

This should be game set and match. After more than an hour of this, you’re thinking, lovely, the climactic battle scene is finally over, so maybe the credits will roll now, and I can go smoke some heroin, but no: endless scenes of escaping through the underground caves, and they’re caught again, so sadistic Oliver Reed – sans any wound to his belly, where Urbano Barberini just shoved a molten-hot poker a few minutes before – can throw them all into a pit of fire. This farcical scene warrants the only complement I can think of for this movie: its requisite throwing-the-good-guys-into-a-pit-of-death-in-a-low-budget-swords-and-sorcery scene is much better than a similar scene in Joe D’Amato’s Ator II: The Blade Master. D’Amato gave us sparse sets and pit of lethargic snakes. Gor director Fritz Kiersch (whom I grudgingly love for Tuff Turf) gives us FIRE in a pleasant, outdoor setting. Kind of gives it a hint of gritty realism.

Outlaw of Gor is currently only available as an episode of Mystery Science Theater, which is very, very appropriate. A standalone release of this movie would be an enormous waste of the studio’s – and the public’s – time. C’mon, this thing was filmed concurrently with Gor, and yet producer/vice-king Harry Alan Towers had the temerity to sack Kiersch, replacing him with John “Bud” Cardos, (Kingdom of the Spiders, The Day Time Ended), for the sequel, thereby throwing a wrench in the works (“The two leads,” Cardos told Daniel Griffith, “they kinda got married to the first director… We had a little differences there for quite a while”). Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been a better picture had Kiersch stayed on?

Pay close attention to Urbano Barberini at the beginning of the movie when he and Russel Savadier first arrive on Gor. Barberini seems oddly out of sorts for someone who made the role of Tarl Cabot his own a few weeks earlier when the first movie filmed. Chalk it up to the directorial switch?

Much ink has been spilled over Savadier’s bizarre behavior during this scene, but it bears repeating: he says “Cabot” 27 times within 2 minutes and 3 seconds. Transcript:

“Cabot. Cabot. Cabot – Cabot, are you ok? Cabot, speak to me. Cabot. Cabot, are you alright? Cabot, what the hell’s going on? Where the hell’s the car? Cabot?” After Cabot explains they’re on the planet Gor: “Listen Cabot, what are you talking about? Where the hell are we? What’s going on here, Cabot? Cabot, will you explain this to me? … Cabot, listen. Listen to me. Cabot, what’s going on here. What happened last night? Did I do something? What’s going on here, Cabot? Cabot, listen, would you speak to me? I wanna go home right now, alright Cabot? What – where are you going? No no, wait there Cabot. Tell me what the hell’s going on here… Cabot… Cabot, would you wait up? … Cabot, wait – hold on. Cabot, can we take a break? Cabot, I – it, it’s getting hot. Have you noticed? It’s getting warm. Cabot. Cabot. Cabot, can – can we just hold it a minute?"

Elsewhere, an extra playing one of the queen’s guards is clearly asleep in one scene, a car rides through the background in another scene, the cast walks around a 7-foot tall statue of an erect penis at one point, and you can see an extra hiding behind the queen’s outdoor throne near the end. Two arch-villain über-clichés are deployed, one by Jack Palance (“That old fool, the elder – he would dare to meddle in my affairs?”), and one by Donna Denton, as the Queen Lara (“Guards! Seize him!”). Remember that Oliver Reed already screamed “Seize him!” in the first Gor movie. But hey, kudos to Ms. Denton for delivering the most memorable line of either movie with considerable gusto: “Get out of here, you – disgusting – WORM.”

Also, both movies boast the worst fight scenes of all time. Truly. We've moved beyond amateur here – I’ve seen better and more realistic choreography on an elementary school playground.

Carl Panzram once wrote, “the only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it…”

This sums up my feelings towards everyone involved with the Gor films perfectly.

Queen at 49, Part VI

A DAY AT THE RACES (December 1976)

One could reasonably argue that the apex of Queen’s toxic relationship with the music press was the period between September 11, 1976 and June 18, 1977.

September of '76 saw the New Musical Express’ Phil McNeill unleash a truly impressive array of insults in an article reviewing Queen’s performance that summer at the Edinburgh Festival, contemptuously taking them to task for everything from Brighton Rock (“meaningless exercise”) to Death On Two Legs (“self-righteous... unflinching immaturity...”) to Flick of the Wrist (“a treasure trove of superficialities”) to A Night at the Opera as a whole (“heavy-handed idiocy”) to even the medley the band did every night (a “garish, posturing event”). Odd that he accused the band of self-righteousness, when his article is self-righteousness writ large. Irony on a base level, as the late Bill Hicks would say.

June of '77 saw NME’s Tony Stewart being a total creep to Freddie under the belligerent headline, “Is This Man a Prat?” After conceding he didn’t request the interview to play nice (“the confrontation undoubtedly started with some mutual hostility”), Stewart seemingly enjoys being rude and insufferable to the singer for as long as Freddie will take it. He taunts. He baits. He criticizes Queen for not abiding by the “great musical change” perpetrated by the “New Wave” bands that don’t treat concerts as “the ceremonial idolisation of Star by Fans.” (Here Freddie only adds to the perception that Queen are a bunch of pretentious egos: “[Fans] want to see you rush off in limousines. They get a buzz.”) Freddie angrily calls Stewart “narrowminded” and “arrogant.” Stewart calls Queen’s new album, A Day at the Races, “bland and unsubstantial, musically and lyrically... artistically on the decline.”

And so it went. In this day and age of Post-Wayne’s World, Bohemian-Rhapsody-Starring-Rami-Malek-as-the-Beloved-Genius-Freddie-Mercury Age of Queen Adulation, it's easy to forget how frequently the music press, both in the UK and the USA, heaped scorn on the band – indeed, relished doing so – prior to Freddie’s death. Both of the above articles followed a template getting depressingly familiar to Queen fans by then: music magazines going well out of their way to find the writer on staff who most despised the band, and assigning that person to interview the band or review the new record.

Into this animosity came A Day at the Races, an album destined to be the bastard stepchild of the Queen catalog, hitting stores one year after A Night at the Opera. How does a band one-up their masterpiece?

Even Queen fans are divided on answering that question. BBC Radio DJ Paul Gambaccini was one of those who was skeptical: “I had been happy that You’re My Best Friend followed Bohemian Rhapsody because it was so different. It was going from this amazing segmented masterpiece to a heartfelt pop song. Keep the variety going. That was always the secret of The Beatles, and Elton (Bleah. – Ed). Every single is different.

“Somebody to Love (A Day at the Races’ first single) comes out, and it is very obviously Son of Bohemian Rhapsody. And although, if Bohemian Rhapsody had never appeared, Somebody to Love would’ve seemed like a breakthrough – it wasn’t a breakthrough. And you always worry for a group because they’ve got to somehow keep the momentum going.”

We here at Ranting Russell wholeheartedly concur with Mr. Gambaccini: Queen’s Somebody to Love is remarkably unremarkable – wildly overrated, in fact – and we’ve never understood why the band kept it in their live set for so many years. James McNair once called it “a yearning, masterfully arranged vocal extravaganza” and “a bona fide classic.” If, by “masterful” and “classic” he meant “cloying,” “overwrought,” and “boring,” then we back him 100%.

But the album’s lead single being one of Freddie’s weaker efforts is just one reason A Day at the Races, for many years, had the peculiar honor of being The Long-Lost Queen Album After They Got Huge, despite its going to #1 in the UK and #5 in the U.S. at the time of its release. Another reason was the arrival of Live Killers in June of 1979, the first official Queen live product. For Queen fans who came of age in the late 70s/early 80s, Live Killers was a seismic event. An exhilarating document of a (nearly) complete Queen concert, it acted as a greatest hits album two-and-a-half years before the arrival of the actual Greatest Hits album. It quickly became our go-to record for ages. All the hits and great songs, electrified with that special energy that comes only from a live performance, replete with adoring fans and Freddie leading the charge.

And out of 22 songs, only 1 track from A Day at the Races.

Tie Your Mother Down appears as the second song on side four. Think about that: fans listening to Live Killers from beginning to end were reminded that A Day at the Races ever even existed only deep into the set, just before the encore. Otherwise, the two-record set draws heavily from A Night at the Opera (7 songs) and News of the World (6 songs). The album they were touring at the time of Live Killers’ release, Jazz, is represented by four songs (and a brief snippet of a fifth), Sheer Heart Attack by three songs, and Queen by one song.

This had the curious effect of rendering A Day at the Races, years later, as an intriguing unofficial Rarities album, a kind of unintentional collection of deep cuts. May’s Long Away is one of the Great Queen Songs You’ve Never Heard, with all the gorgeous melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions that seemed to flow so readily from the guitarist’s fertile mind and ridiculously long fingers during the band’s golden, pre-synthesizer era. It’s also one of the few genuinely despairing songs in the band’s oeuvre, with poignant lyrics that still connect to this day (“Does anyone care anyway? For all the prayers in heaven, so much of life’s this way” to the denouement “I’m leaving here, I’m long away…”). Deacon’s You and I doesn’t have You’re My Best Friend’s instantly-catchy hook, but its bright tunefulness grows on you mercilessly over repeated listens, lurching feverishly from time change to time change.

It’s impossible not getting swept along by Freddie’s Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy, this album’s music hall/vaudeville submission (see “Bring Back that Leroy Brown” and “Seaside Rendezvous”). It’s not meant to be anything other than a giddy song about romancing and sex, but Freddie was the master of endlessly catchy, giddy songs about romancing and sex, and there's no way not to love this song. Taylor’s drumming is impeccable.

As regards Roger Taylor, his one contribution here, Drowse, is yet another ever-annoying nostalgic take on childhood – his childhood, to be sure – and the endless boredom, the “easier lays,” he must endure before becoming a rock god. Although lyrically redundant in light of Sheer Heart Attack’s Tenement Funster, it’s one more song from Races that doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it until it grows on you and you just fucking love it. At first you want it to rock harder than it does, but then it occurs to you that its borderline excruciatingly slow tempo (in 6/8, same as I’m In Love with My Car) is symbiotic with the lyrics, and once you make this connection, Taylor’s genius becomes clear, and the lyrics go from irritating to damned funny, and even moving. The genius of everything else in the mix then falls naturally into place: May’s minimalist slide guitar, and Taylor’s perfectly-placed cymbal crash at 0:08, jarringly capturing all of childhood’s boredom and uncertainty (That is, if you weren’t born in Syria or Democratic Republic of the Congo – Ed.).

Alas, May’s White Man is a not-so-deep-cut, the guitarist’s honest, if misguided, attempt to weigh in on the horrors of Native American genocide. It would be five-and-a-half years before May would go political again, with better results the second time around on 1982’s Hot Space. White Man sounded much better live.

Somebody to Love struck Paul Gambaccini as Son of Bohemian Rhapsody, but really it's The Millionaire Waltz, Freddie’s 5-minute epic (lyrically almost indistinguishable from Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy) that more closely follow's Bo Rap's blueprint. At least six different parts play almost one after the other, with no formal verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eight structure. Although not as instantly tuneful as Bo Rap, Millionaire has that solid It-Grows-On-You quality, prevalent throughout the entire album, that consumes you after repeated listenings. Deacon’s lead bass playing makes me laugh out of pure joy every time I listen to it, and the whole staff recommends you crank your volume up to eleven when the Loud Part starts at 2:20. It rocks. Hard.

You Take My Breath Away is one of the most remarkable songs Freddie ever wrote. With no obvious, ready-for-airplay chord progressions, and the most beautiful lyric he ever wrote for any of his multitudinous love songs (“Every time you make a move you destroy my mind”), Breath’s stark arrangement sets it apart from the rest of the album’s mildly bombastic vibe. It was even more mind-bendingly gorgeous live, as you can hear on the Hyde Park version (an extra on the 2011 Races remaster), and the Earls Court version, where Freddie stays solidly on point after some loud, accidental feedback at 1:59 (although we’d like to believe it was Roger Taylor intentionally messing with the frontman).

Album opener Tie Your Mother Down is seriously rocking, raucous fun, containing a sprinkle of everything we love Queen for: soaring harmonies, a Brian May lead that starts as an Ace Frehley-esque 70s rock solo and ends with some over-the-top slide, and Freddie, front and center, at the height of his vocal prowess. Freddie’s voice never sounded so strong and assured as it does on this album, and never would again. He's at his glorious peak here in 1976. Tie Your Mother Down, You Take My Breath Away, and The Millionaire Waltz constitute the most powerful work Mercury – one of the great rock ‘n’ roll vocalists – ever committed to tape.

Having received a hero’s welcome in Japan for their spring 1975 tour, Brian May returned the favor by writing two verses in Japanese for Races’ album closer, Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together). May’s dark side once again counterbalances Mercury’s music hall numbers in a song about death and separation, a theme he returned to on the band’s next album. It would seem, listening to this, Tie Your Mother Down, and Long Away, that the guitarist was simply incapable of writing anything that wasn’t either catchy as hell or straight-up lovely. Another marvelous Queen song, and a perfect way to wrap up an album that didn’t – and still hasn’t – gotten its due as one of the band’s finer efforts.

A Day at the Races began its ascent in the charts in December of 1976, two months after Stiff Records released The Damned’s New Rose. Punk Rock was the new rage, and Queen stood on shaky ground as their grandiosness and bombast were cast in sharp relief by Punk’s straightforward, barre chord assault. No doubt Tony Stewart was one of many who watched, knife in hand, waiting to see how the band would respond.